The transaction fees of Bitcoin have risen again. On 6th December 2023, bitinfocharts.com reported that BTC, on average, has risen to 27.55 dollars.
Presently, the transaction fee, on average, hovers near 13.93 dollars, alongside an increasing backlog of transactions that are not confirmed at 249,000 during the time of this report.
Rising Backlog Drives Sharp Increase in Bitcoin Transaction Fees:
The BTC mempool that records unconfirmed transactions waiting miner verification has 249,000 transactions pending verifications currently. This increase in the number of unconfirmed transactions collaborates with a rise in Ordinal inscriptions that consume block space apart from financial transactions.
At the moment, 493 megabytes or 287 blocks of block space must be clear to reduce the backlog. Every day, Ordinal inscriptions consume more than 50% of transactions with the tally currently reaching 47.77 million inscriptions on the BTC blockchain.
Although transaction costs fell briefly between five dollars to 7 dollars per transfer around 26th November until 2nd December, they rose in the next week. By 6 December, the on-chain fee jumped to 27.55 dollars per transaction, with the median fee rising to 17.70 dollars.
At the time, the fee stood at 13.93 dollars or 0.00033 BTC on average, while the median fee was 10.75 dollars or 0.00025 BTC per transaction. On 13th December, Checkmate, the lead on-chain analyst of Glassnode, commented on the complete mempool as well as the discontent it has led among certain users of Bitcoin.
Checkmate mentioned that inscriptions, especially smaller text files, make up about fifty percent of transactions daily but less than 10% of block data size.
In spite of this, the analyst mentioned that they contribute significantly to transaction fees accounting for 40% to 20% of the overall amount.
These inscriptions typically benefit from the Segwit discount, making them entirely apeace-efficient in BTC blocks as highlighted by Checkmate.
The keypoint of the analyst was that the inscriptions enhance fee and value efficiency within the existing size of block, thereby enhancing the network of Bitcoin.
The analyst concluded, “Your opposition is purely ideological and subjective. Fortunately, Bitcoin has a set of consensus rules which are objective and do not respond to our feelings or subjective values.”
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